Just know you’re not alone while wallowing in your misery of wasted time, money and effort

Tough words from a wife, but how else was she supposed to react when I told her all 13 of my brackets had busted on the second day of the NCAA tournament?

The two I had at work were finished. The one in my Father-in-law’s pool? Kaput. Even the ones I filled out for fun on
ESPN.com.

I’ve never lost two Final Four teams in the Round of 64 before this year. Thanks a lot Georgetown and Wisconsin. Also, I refuse to call it the second round. The four play-in games barely count.

I didn’t really feel too bad at the time, despite my bride questioning my manhood. I was busy drafting a fantasy baseball team at spring training in Arizona, and I still had my two championship teams left — Louisville and Indiana.

Crazier things had happened, right? I mean, Florida Gulf Coast made the Sweet 16 as a No. 15 seed! I didn’t even know they had colleges in Florida.

However, my hopes were dashed quicker than you can ask, “What’s a Shocker?” I ended up with only Louisville in my Empty Eight, and the rest will go down as my worst tournament performance ever.

Heck, by picking the Cardinals to win the whole thing, I’m positive I caused Kevin Ware’s leg to explode.

The bad thing about filling out all your brackets online is you can’t light your computer on fire.

Hopefully, if you had a rough go of it this year like me, this will cheer you up:

It’s not as easy as it looks

I read an article where a math professor from DePaul University figured out the odds of picking a perfect bracket. Basically, there are 63 matchups throughout the tournament, one less than the amount of teams (everyone but the champion loses a game). The odds of getting a team right is 50 percent, so you multiply two by two, 63 times. The short version is two to the 63rd power.

The odds of getting a perfect bracket is 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. That’s 1 in over nine quintillion (18 zeros). Feel better about your bracket yet? I feel like I’d have a better chance of winning the lottery, the Nobel Peace prize and Dancing With the Stars on the same day. Which is ridiculous because my fox trot is mediocre at best.

At least Duke didn’t win

Unless your last name is Krzyzewski, you live in Durham, N.C., you’re my friend Cornelius or U-T Sports Editor Todd Adams — I know too many Duke fans … yes, two are too many — there’s absolutely no reason to root for the Blue Devils. Rooting for Duke is like rooting for the IRS, or even worse, King Joffrey Baratheon from “Game of Thrones.” That’s right, I just compared Coach K and Duke’s basketball team to a petulant elitist who’s also a cowardly, psychopathic sadist.

Beyond the bracket

Regardless if you picked games based on fictitious mascot battles, a complex algorithm, or my personal favorite: an all-knowing octopus, you’re almost certainly regretting your decisions. It’s ironic, too, considering all of this really comes down to a bunch of college kids, and who makes more questionable decisions than college kids?

We put ourselves through this self-humbling ritual every year, only to end up with brackets so covered with crossouts they look like a heavily redacted State Department memo from “Zero Dark Thirty.” I have to admit, though, despite being maddening at times, March certainly didn’t disappoint.

Winning your pool is a nice feeling, of course, but CBS won’t be editing a video montage for pool-winners nationwide. It’s the bracket busters, the unheralded players with unforgettable performances, the buzzer-beaters that make the tournament so great (and so extremely difficult to predict).